


Not Falling Down

by Eledhwen



Category: Daredevil (TV), Iron Fist (TV), Jessica Jones (TV), Luke Cage (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: A very competitive game of Jenga, Christmas Fluff, Gen, They're all a big dysfunctional happy family really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:41:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28456242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eledhwen/pseuds/Eledhwen
Summary: They had eaten, and drunk, and cleared away – Karen and Foggy and Colleen had done most of the clearing, while the others lay about in various states of post-Christmas dinner stupor.Danny, being Danny, was the first to recover and sit up. “Jenga,” he said.Foggy, who had just flopped down again, raised his head from Marci’s shoulder. “What now?”“Jenga!” Danny repeated, and got up from his seat. “I bought a Jenga set. Because it’s Christmas and we should be playing family games.”
Comments: 12
Kudos: 61
Collections: DDE’s 2021 New Year’s Day Exchange





	Not Falling Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Notawriterjustalurker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Notawriterjustalurker/gifts).



> Dear Notawriterjustalurker - Happy New Year! I hope you enjoy this slightly ridiculous piece of Christmassy fluff sparked by your prompt for 'a very competitive game of Jenga', featuring plenty of Matt with a side order of the rest of the Defenders and hangers-on.

They had eaten, and drunk, and cleared away – Karen and Foggy and Colleen had done most of the clearing, while the others lay about in various states of post-Christmas dinner stupor.

Danny, being Danny, was the first to recover and sit up. “Jenga,” he said.

Foggy, who had just flopped down again, raised his head from Marci’s shoulder. “What now?”

“Jenga!” Danny repeated, and got up from his seat. “I bought a Jenga set. Because it’s Christmas and we should be playing family games.”

“But we’re not a family,” Marci objected.

“We totally are a family,” Danny returned.

Matt, from the soft cocoon of his armchair, nodded. “I think we are,” he said. “Dysfunctional, perhaps, but a family of sorts.” He paused. “What’s Jenga?”

There was a chorus of “whaattt!” from the others. Matt shrugged. “My dad didn’t go in for games, and neither did the nuns,” he pointed out.

“Oh, Matt,” Karen said, her body radiating concern.

“Hey, it’s good,” he said, hastening to reassure them. “Just tell me it isn’t some game with instructions on cards.”

Danny hauled what sounded like a heavy box into the middle of the room. “If it had been, I’d have got them done in Braille,” he pointed out. “But no, no instructions on cards.” He opened the box and tipped out a whole load of wooden blocks on to the floor.

Matt heaved himself out of the chair and went to investigate. Each block was smooth wood and they were all the same size.

“So what happens?” he asked.

Everyone tried to explain at once, while Danny started stacking the blocks in a kind of tower. Matt listened for a moment and then waved his hand in the air to stop them.

“Just one of you?” he pleaded.

“Danny’s building a tower,” Karen said, after a moment. “Three blocks one way, three the other, until they’re all used. Then each of us takes it in turn to move one block out of the middle and up to the top. Until it all falls over.”

“But you can only use one hand at a time to move a block,” Marci added, “though God only knows why.”

“Because those are the rules!” Danny said, stacking the last block and moving away.

Matt considered. “It sounds … simple enough,” he said.

“Sounds simple,” Luke put in, from Karen’s side. “It ain’t.”

Jessica, boots on a low table, drank from the bottle of whiskey in her hand – the potent smell whispering through the room and into Matt’s nostrils – and said, “I’m watching.”

“So who’s in?” Danny asked.

“Me,” said Foggy.

“Why the hell not,” Marci said, coming to sit by the tower of blocks.

Colleen and Karen joined them, as, after a moment, did Claire. Luke sat back, protesting he wasn’t dexterous enough to play.

Matt focused in as Colleen made the first move, gently sliding one of the blocks out and with a triumphant little noise placing it on the top of the tower. Karen went next, not quite as gentle but with equal success. Then Foggy, and then it was Matt’s turn.

He reached out with a finger and touched the tower, carefully, so as not to knock it, tapping a block with a fingernail to see how loose it was.

“Don’t go knocking it over before we’ve barely started,” Foggy said.

Matt paused. “It’s not like I can see which ones are easy to get at, Fogs,” he argued.

“Aren’t you supposed to have, like, super-senses?” Jessica put in, from her seat.

“They don’t help much for blocks of wood that aren’t moving,” Matt retorted, tapping another block. He made a decision, and eased it out of the tower, listening to the minute scrape as it slid out of the stack, before placing it carefully on top. “There.”

They went around again. Danny made his choices quickly, and moved swiftly. Foggy hmmed and haahed a bit while he took his block. Karen thought before she moved, and Colleen fell somewhere in between Karen and Danny. Claire was, unsurprisingly, nimble and skilled with her fingers; Marci was decisive and sensible.

Everyone was silent as each of them made their moves, and Matt listened in fascination to the differing heartbeats. Foggy was nervous about the game, his heart tapping out a brisk, staccato rhythm. Colleen was the calmest; Claire, too, had good control over her body’s response to the need to remain cool. Matt supposed it came from years of managing a busy ER.

Danny kept chattering, about the dinner, about how much better Christmas was when you embraced the full over-the-topness of it and didn’t try for an ascetic, monastery-led approach to holidays. “Next year maybe I’ll join you at Mass, Matt,” he said, with enthusiasm.

“You’d be welcome,” Matt said, as Foggy took a deep breath before moving his third block. “Plenty of people only turn up at Christmas.”

He studied the tower. Foggy moved back from it, making the floorboards of Marci’s apartment – proper wood, of course – creak. A small shudder went through the tower, so small that Matt was confident nobody else would have heard it. There was a vulnerability, he thought, about a third of the way up, and so low down nobody else had yet been brave enough to try removing a block.

He bent down and tapped the block in question, focusing in and tuning out Danny’s chatter, everyone’s breathing and heartbeats, the slosh of liquid as Jessica had another drink and passed the bottle to Luke.

Claire drew in her breath, sharp enough to break Matt’s focus for a second. “Oooh, that’s a risk,” she said, as his hand hovered next to the block in question.

“Matty, are you sure about this?” Foggy said. “You know you hate losing.”

Matt paused, and withdrew his hand a fraction. He nodded, without turning his head. “I’m sure,” he said.

The others fell silent, watching, as Matt pushed gently on his chosen block and extracted it. For a second he feared he’d made the wrong choice, as the tower nearly shook, but then the block was free, and he added it to the top of the top of the tower.

“Nice,” Jessica commented.

Nobody made any more clever comments now and Matt felt like he could reach out and pluck the tension in the room with his finger. Clearly, he thought, suggesting a competitive game to a bunch of smart, obsessive types used to winning things was always going to end this way – and he was damned if he was going to let one of the others beat him at a game which, so far, played to his strengths.

The tower grew. There were more empty spaces under Matt’s fingers as he made his selections, and fewer obvious choices. The stack felt like it was ready to tumble at any second, and he found himself moving with more than Daredevil caution as he crept in to take his turn and back away from the precarious structure.

“I’m literally sweating,” Foggy said, wiping his hands on his pants as he prepared for his go. It took him four tries to loosen his chosen block of wood and put it on the top of the pile.

“I’m sure this thing is going to fall over any minute,” Colleen said, as Matt considered his options.

“Not yet,” Matt said, giving a block near the base of the tower a cautious tap with his fingernail. “Or at least, not by my hands.”

Danny laughed. “Fighting talk, Murdock.”

Matt paused. “How is this game won, anyway?”

“Last person to successfully move a brick without the tower falling over,” Karen said, promptly. Matt grinned at her, and she sighed.

“Well done, Karen,” Marci said. “Now you’ve just encouraged him.”

“I don’t think Murdock needs encouragement to beat people,” observed Luke, from his chair.

“Shhh,” Matt said, “let me focus.”

They shut up, and he could feel them watching him as he pushed gently on the piece he had picked. It shifted, but the tower did too. He froze, and let everything settle, and then moved around and tried again from the other side. Now the piece came loose, and he laid it at the pinnacle of the tower.

“Dammit,” Marci said, with a hint of admiration.

Somehow they managed to go around again, everyone’s turns taking a little longer as they held their breath and moved blocks with extra caution. As Colleen went for her next go, Luke said to Jessica, “bet you Claire wins”.

“You’re only saying that because you’re …” Jessica started, but Luke cut in.

“I’m saying that because she’s the best at this,” Luke said, loyally and genuinely.

“Okay,” said Jessica, swinging her boots off the table and holding out a hand to Luke, “I bet you fifty bucks Murdock wins.”

Matt gave her a broad smile. “Only fifty?” he said.

“Piss off, Murdock,” Jessica said, but there was no heat in it.

“Done,” Luke said.

Claire sighed. “No pressure, then,” she said.

Colleen flicked her plait back over her shoulder, the heavy braid falling soft on her back. “Maybe I’ll win,” she said, and hurried to add, “no, Danny, you don’t need to bet on me. Let Luke and Jess waste their money.”

She managed to extract a block after some careful manoeuvring, and sat back with a satisfied “hah”. Karen, her pulse elevated and her fingers clammy, succeeded too.

Matt listened to Foggy make his move, noting his friend’s nerves. “Just breathe,” he recommended, as Foggy held his breath for a second too long.

“Creepy, and not helpful,” Foggy said, pausing, but the comment seemed to help and he eventually wiggled a block loose from the pile. “Yes!”

Matt gave his hands a shake, and for a second closed his eyes and shut the rest of them out. Then he bent down and started examining the pieces at the base of the tower. He was pretty sure one of them would be both loose enough to pull out, and in such a place that it would not harm the integrity of the rest of the structure.

“Oh, come _on_!” said Karen.

“It’s gonna come down,” Luke put in.

Pausing again, Matt tuned all his senses into the wooden tower. He gave the floor a slight tap, feeling the reverberations through the pile of bricks, and listened again. There.

He moved swiftly now, pushing his chosen block smoothly out of the tower and depositing it gently at the apex of the tower.

Marci, due to go next, made an annoyed noise.

“You’re impossible, Matt,” she said.

“Someone doesn’t like losing,” Foggy laughed, on securer ground because the chances of him losing had suddenly diminished.

“We’ve known Marci doesn’t like losing since I beat her in that moot competition at school,” Matt pointed out.

“Not helping, Franklin,” Marci said coolly.

Foggy shut up.

Matt knew even before Marci had got the block half-free that it was a failed mission. He could feel the tower beginning to fall, the vibrations like a tiny earthquake on the apartment floor, and then the whole thing came crashing down, sending wooden blocks flying.

“That’s fifty bucks,” Jessica said to Luke, and he grumbled as he dug a few notes from his pockets.

“Matt wins!” said Danny, triumphantly. “Shall we go again?”

He was shouted down by pretty much everyone. Matt went and fetched beers from the fridge and handed them out, and settled back into his armchair with an uncharacteristic warm fuzzy feeling. Maybe it was the effect of the alcohol, dulling his senses a little, or the food, but as Karen came to perch on the arm of his chair and rest against his shoulder, he thought that this must be what most people felt, about this time of year. Connected, and together, and safe. And winning, at Jenga, and perhaps also at life.


End file.
